Alienation obviates living-space entanglement
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing 2015
Water makes life on Earth possible. Yet clean water is becoming an increasingly scarce and
aggressively privatized commodity across the globe. Meanwhile our sanitary system uses an
abundance of water to flush human excrements out of sight and out of mind. What a waste!
Realization of this contradiction, which hides in plain sight in the privileged lives of those with
access to water closets, has directed the artist duo Harrie Liveart on the research journey they call Collective Perversions - Proposal for Revaluation.
The everyday infrastructure of toilets not only points out the dilemmas concerning water, but also opens up a plethora of questions about unsustainable circulation of nutrients and value. The water closet makes tangible the alienation that fuels capitalist exploitation. The artists have set out to challenge this alienation, drawing attention to cultural attitudes towards bodily processes and to the significance of more-than-human entanglements both within our bodies and wider ecosystems. The artworks created during the research map out the myriad paths of inquiry the artists have embarked upon in multidisciplinary and multispecies collaborations, which have yielded a number of still ongoing processes.
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